Search for non-resonant Higgs boson pair production in the bb ν ν final state with the ATLAS detector in pp collisions at √ s = 13 TeV

Article history: Received 19 August 2019 Received in revised form 4 December 2019 Accepted 5 December 2019 Available online 13 December 2019 Editor: M. Doser A search for non-resonant Higgs boson pair production, as predicted by the Standard Model, is presented, where one of the Higgs bosons decays via the H → bb channel and the other via one of the H → W W ∗/Z Z∗/ττ channels. The analysis selection requires events to have at least two b-tagged jets and exactly two leptons (electrons or muons) with opposite electric charge in the final state. Candidate events consistent with Higgs boson pair production are selected using a multi-class neural network discriminant. The analysis uses 139 fb−1 of pp collision data recorded at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. An observed (expected) upper limit of 1.2 (0.9+0.4 −0.3) pb is set on the non-resonant Higgs boson pair production cross-section at 95% confidence level, which is equivalent to 40 (29+14 −9 ) times the value predicted in the Standard Model. © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP3.